Black Hat comes to Abu Dhabi

29 July

Black Hat, one of the most prestigious security conferences in the world, is coming to Abu Dhabi. The conference, which already has a strong presence in Europe and North America, will be holding its inaugural event in the middle eastern region in November this year.

The Black Hat conference family is the launch pad for tens of high-profile news stories each year, as security researchers come together and discuss ther latest findings. These experts reverse engineer operating systems, pieces together innovative attack methods to penetrate the defences of web applications, and build devices to foil the security measures on wireless and wired networks. Black Hat has been the forum for some news articles of global interest, including the 2008 revelation of a bug in the Domain Naming System that could have bought the Internet to its knees.

Several organisations worked together to bring Black Hat to Abu Dhabi. The UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) and the Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research (KUSTAR) collaborated on the initiative, and were supported by aeCERT, the UAE's computer emergency response team.

Interested parties can attend the conference at Emirates Palace. It will offer two days of intensive technical training, along with two more days of expert briefings, and will run from November 8-11, 2010

Abu Dhabi is not the only security conference of note in the United Arab Emirates. Hack In The Box, a renowned security conference, has a presence in Dubai. Abu Dhabi's strong oil and gas business makes it a prime candidate for a security conference. Reports have already uncovered cases of cybersecurity exploits that mined information from oil companies' systems.

The Black Hat announcement is a timely one, given the UAE's recently-announced stance on Blackberry smartphones. The Emirates has said that it considers the Blackberry a potential risk to national security, because of the vendor's decision to relay data to computer servers outside the country and store the data there.